Writing a Personal Statement That Does You Justice
Your medical school personal statement is a critical component to your application that allows you something extremely valuable not found in other numeric components of your application: a voice. Using your unique voice to develop a compelling expression of who you are and why you’re driven to pursue medicine is a challenging, and hopefully rewarding, process. A beautifully written personal statement that is successful at articulating something about you you’ve maybe never articulated before still will not resonate with every admissions committee member it passes under, and it doesn’t need to. You only need it to resonate with the right people. If you can write something truly authentic that does justice to your inspirations, reader, then you must fiercely believe that the right person is going to recognize this, and when that happens, that person will advocate for your acceptance to medical school.
My Personal Statement Journey
Before I launch into the advice/points I think every pre-med student needs to hear regarding personal statement writing, let me explain a bit about my own personal statement journey and my background. I love to read and to write, and grew up extremely lucky to have a county library worker for a father and a public school teacher for a mother, both of whom adore literature. This meant that a large part of my childhood was spent in bookstores and libraries, immersed in beautiful universes of fiction that fed my curiosity and expanded my imagination.
Fast forward a few chapters, and as a biochemistry major in college immersed in pre-med activities, much of my undergraduate sphere was centered on a mixture of hard science courses and utterly adoring the clinical care I witnessed through various roles. The hustle and bustle of college and conventional pre-med pursuits easily could have wound up forming the central basis of my personal statement, but as I approached this task, I knew that what I felt for medicine in the deepest parts of my soul went beyond lewis structures, vector diagrams, and glycolytic intermediates. I protected numerous hours-long sessions where I would wander the sub-basements of the medical buildings on my campus, drawing inspiration from the medical and research environments above me, but able to reflect and write notes in solitude, working to articulate what inspired me to pursue medicine. Over weeks and months of sessions like these, patterns and themes began to emerge in my notes; many of my ideas seemed to stem from a context that shared no immediate connection with the popularized clinical medicine themes that we often associate with personal statements: wandering libraries and reading stories. Although I hadn’t made the conscious realization before then or had the ability to articulate it, I realized that wandering throughout libraries and reading stories that captivated me growing up had ignited my calling to pursue medicine, and that actually for me, libraries, books, and stories had everything to do with medicine.
The hospital and its patients, I realized, are a living library - each person a treasure of experiences, consciousness, and life-stories-in-progress, often experiencing some of their most difficult, vulnerable chapters, through which their health, their being, and their life itself may be in question. Medicine is thus an exploration into our existence and what it means to be human, experienced through life stories of patients, and invoking a sense of curiosity and awe that for me is not unlike what I had felt amongst towering bookshelves as a young learner wandering libraries. Further, medicine as an entire discipline dedicated to unconditionally safeguarding the intrinsic value that is every human’s life, is a direct acknowledgement that life and existence are meaningful beyond measure; that each person is limitless. These core tenets of medicine are sacred, beautiful ideas that should be fiercely defended. In college I saw these inspirations embedded everywhere in medicine - from the resolve by which I had seen trauma surgeons operate through the night to save someone they had never met, to the compassion of emergency physicians going above and beyond to address logistics and help their patients have good continuity of care. Certainly medical practice today is not all a perfect reflection of these noble ideals - our healthcare systems are also riddled with flaws, problems, and injustices that bring real harm to real patients. These misguided elements should be condemned and dismantled, but I don’t assign them the distinction of being part of the true ideas forming medicine. It is from these true ideas of protecting the immeasurable and unconditional worth of every person that I heard my calling into medicine, and began to understand my journey toward medicine from the lens of how important stories have been in my life. The most beautiful life story I could ever live, I realized, was not one I could experience directly, but rather through the stories of my patients, whose experiences, vulnerabilities, and lives, I had the unimaginable privilege of safeguarding.
Over months of drafting and reflecting, libraries and life stories became the central theme/framework of my personal statement. My introduction opened with this theme, all of my experiences/lessons I described during the progression of my training echoed back to this theme, and my final paragraph ended with this theme. I’m very gratified by what I was able to express, and I think it accomplished the ultimate goal of every personal statement: it did justice to my motivation to pursue medicine.
The reason I share this part of my journey is because I believe every person whose heart is truly lit on fire for medicine sees something beautiful and unique in this field that deeply relates to their own lived experiences and perspective, but understanding and articulating this about oneself is a challenge. In a highly competitive application process where there can be this sense of pressure to develop something that you think will please an admissions committee, I want to take some of the lessons/hindsight from my own experience and help readers develop personal statements that truly do them justice. Since applying to medical school myself I’ve been very grateful to get to help many peers and pre-med students develop their personal statements, so in this post I really want to highlight what I believe are the most important points/strategies applicable to everyone in writing their personal statements that I find myself frequently emphasizing.
1. Focus on creating a written work that truly does justice to your inspiration to pursue medicine rather than something you think admission committees want to hear
Right from the beginning, your mindset about the personal statement should be that this is a blank canvas and opportunity through which you can really craft something using your own voice, imagination, theme(s), syntax, structuring, and inspiration, to share what lights your heart on fire about medicine. If right from the beginning of drafting you’re obsessing over admissions committees’ perceptions of every word/phrase you write, you will close yourself off from ever considering a wider array of creative avenues, experiences, and sentences that would otherwise beautifully capture important and unique qualities about you. During later stages of editing, once you’ve done the hard part, which is finding a way to create something that articulates your unique journey/inspiration, yes, you should have some outside people read what you’ve written and give consideration to how admissions committees might interpret what you’re saying, but this should not cloud your thinking or hinder you from taking creative risks as you initially develop your personal statement.
2. Don’t be intimidated if you initially feel like you’re writing cliches or are completely lost
I think many people feel overwhelmed writing their personal statements (myself included) because some of the initial answers they provide echo in their head and immediately sound cliche, kicking off a vicious cycle of imposter syndrome and feeling worried that you’re saying things everyone else is saying, which triggers stress and anxiety that prevent you from reflecting deeply enough to be able to articulate the deeper, more unique articulations for your specific inspiration for pursuing medicine. Do not be overly intimidated by this. Your lived experiences, perspectives, and imagination do not occur a second time in this universe, and within you these create extremely unique and probably beautiful motivations for pursuing medicine; just because you cannot flawlessly write it down on paper on the first try doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Feeling something in your soul and writing it down on paper are two very different things. You need to embrace that developing a personal statement that speaks justice to the wonderful and unique qualities you possess as a person and what you see in medicine is not going to happen overnight, and this process will require a lot of patience and drafting and redrafting. My own personal statement took 17 drafts and probably the first 10 were terribly unorganized ramblings :)
To ultimately conquer the personal statement, you’re going to need to identify the most important experiences, themes, and ways of thinking in your life, and then do something with those that encompasses my next point:
3. You need to go deep. Really really deep
An important component that I think separates out effective, successful personal statements from ones that were more hastily assembled is the ability to go really deep into what specific experiences and parts of your journey meant to you. This is arguably the hardest part, and the most personal part, of personal statements, because the words, ideas, and structuring of what you say here will be completely unique to you. There’s no formula. There shouldn’t be a path you’re following when it comes to this, because you should be the one creating it. That can certainly feel intimidating - but you should also recognize how liberating this is; you have spent so much of your training confined to use the proper units, terminology, timing, etc. Here you have an enormous amount of freedom! Make it count. Go deeper into your descriptions of what you learned from your journey by asking yourself a very simple question: why? So you want to go into medicine because you want to help other people and love science. Why? Why do you want to help other people? Why does that matter? What perspectives or life experiences you’ve had start lighting up when you think about that? Why do those things lead you to feeling like helping others means something? If you keep asking yourself why and going deeper, you’re going to start to find places where you have to think really intensely to answer the ‘why’ at that level - where little hints of possible explanations or ideas are sporadically popping up throughout your brain. That’s perfect; that’s where you want to be. Dive straight into those. And then keep going deeper. Write down every idea that’s coming to you; you can revisit these ideas, condense them, rearrange them, etc., as you develop these ideas further, but getting them down on paper is really important. For me this took dozens of sessions that lasted hours. It’s not an easy process, but this is the raw material that will start to become your first drafts over time. My first ‘drafts’ were often just 20 pages of notes on my iphone of chaotic and jumbled thoughts, but revisiting these led me to further refinements, and further thoughts, that eventually resulted in real drafts. It’s hard to know how long this process will take, but don’t compromise on it. If you sense that there’s something deeper lurking behind an answer you’re giving, you’re right - dive in and go after the deeper explanation.
4. Don’t say what you DID; say what you LEARNED
A very common issue I see in personal statements, which can be very tempting as it feels like you’re emphasizing to admissions committees the amazing things you accomplished, is taking up way too much text saying what you did, rather than what you learned. Now this point has some nuance, because yes in order to talk about what you learned from something, you do need to describe what that something was, but the key point here is to spend MINIMAL space describing what you did. You will go far deeper and be able to articulate much more about the unique person you are if you describe what you did almost as a stepping stone to get to your real content, which is going way deeper into that experience by describing what it meant to you, what you learned from it, how it maybe altered your trajectory toward medicine, or how it impacted how you see the field of medicine. Drilling down into these latter types of content is where you will find yourself starting to write much more unique answers/descriptions that depart from the cliche phrasing we all want to avoid. This requires a lot of reflection. You have maybe been so busy hustling/bustling as a pre-med that you haven’t even had the time to step back and deeply reflect on what something meant to you, even though you know it meant a lot. Grab a pen and paper and start jotting whatever your heart tells you. If you put in the time/effort to doing this, then the goal is to start to link together important/formative experiences from different chapters of your life that you think are important enough to be incorporated into your personal statement, and understand how these individual experiences link together or led to one another, throughout your life. A sign that you are starting to go deeper (which is where you need to go to write a personal statement that does you justice) is when you’re describing the lessons/growth/beauty you see in medicine that resulted from one experience, and how that evolved in the next experience.
5. Choose environments and conditions that inspire you for reflecting + writing sessions
From the points we’ve already covered, you can imagine that drafting your personal statement can be cerebral, cognitively demanding, and complex. The quality of what you’re able to write down during any given reflecting/writing session is highly affected by your environment and your internal state. I highly recommend finding spaces where you can be completely alone to think and doing so in physical settings that mean something to you - this could be in or near medical buildings, it could be places from your childhood that are important to you, it could be in a cemetery near where a loved one rests, it could be somewhere nostalgic to you that you once had a breakdown in but have come a long way since - do not underestimate how much this can move you and inspire you to be able to realize and write down ideas that are critical for your personal statement. Further, if there is music that inspires you, this is a good time to bring that out as well.
6. Protect time to immediately write down ideas as they occur to you
For me, a significant portion of my personal statement writing could not be forced to occur at a specific time/schedule. I’m not saying I didn’t block off significant time chunks in evenings etc., where I worked on making edits, reading previous ideas and edits, and consolidating drafts. This was important as well. But equally important for me was making the conscious decision to allow myself, if I ever had an important realization or idea, to drop whatever I was doing (if I could) and write it down IMMEDIATELY before I forgot it. My fiance can tell you that there were multiple nights where I woke up in the middle of the night with a realization, and spent an hour writing it down before it was gone. This source of raw, unfiltered ideas was crucial content that fed into more cohesive drafts over months of doing this.
7. Give yourself enough time
Developing and drafting a personal statement that truly does you justice is no easy task. I don’t say this to add pressure to anyone operating on significant time constraints, but rather to validate the complexity of this challenge, when I say that you should be engaging in this process for months rather than weeks. Really try to protect at least several months where you can have time between reflecting+writing sessions and let some of your ideas mature, where you can sleep on your ideas, because it is difficult to try and rush that process and critical realizations may emerge only after two months of exploring ideas and drafting. This is not to say you should panic or lose hope if you are just starting and don’t have the luxury of months to write your personal statement, but if this is your situation, my best advice is try to be kind to yourself. All of the other points and advice I make in this post remain valid for you, and you should protect as much time as you can to dedicate yourself to this process of drafting, but consciously choose to focus on the positives and all the progress you’ve made/are making instead of on the negatives. You can absolutely develop a beautiful and compelling personal statement without having months to prepare it, but this is a challenging process - there will be times where it may feel overwhelming, and you need to mentally train yourself to keep your resilience and attitude up, as this will allow you to perform at your best, including with your writing, so allow yourself grace and kindness.
8. Do not confine yourself to only describing concrete achievements
You are a complex and beautiful person. There are no doubt many dimensions to who you are, to experiences you’ve had, to different ways you’ve thought about the world in different eras of your life. You may have been through some different ‘seasons’ in terms of how you think, how you approach the world, what you enjoy doing, what you value, etc. These things comprise critical parts of who you are, and many of them have probably been a larger part of your journey than you may realize, but you aren’t necessarily used to articulating them or thinking about them, because most parts of the pre-med system are very concrete and number-oriented. The point I want to make with this item is, explore different ways of thinking about yourself and your life. There is an enormous wealth of diverse, beautiful frames/perspectives by which you can reflect upon, and articulate through your writing, who you are, the beauty that you see in medicine, and what you have to give. Please allow yourself the time and thought to explore these things, without just boxing yourself into only considering what you think OTHER people expect to see on a personal statement. It does not just have to be directly clinical-related hospital experiences. Medicine, the art and science of manifesting unconditional love for all human beings by safeguarding their existence, is so much more than what happens in the hospital; in fact, it’s whatever you want it to be, and ESPECIALLY if you have perspective, experiences, and ideas that have nothing to do directly with a hospital and yet they still have enormous effects on what you bring to medicine and you can clearly see their relationship with medicine, WRITE ABOUT THIS! I fiercely believe that every single person whose heart is on fire for medicine has a wide breadth of beautiful and unique ideas, experiences, and perspectives they can offer medicine that arise from their unique experiences in life and their consciousness. However, it can be easy for people to miss this and undervalue themselves if they are only used to evaluating themselves in terms of the concrete metrics and deliverables that are constantly talked about everywhere throughout pre-med culture: MCAT, GPA, ‘extracurriculars’, etc. Your personal statement is an essential opportunity to step outside of this, and if you focus on doing justice to yourself rather than pleasing others in what you write, if you TRULY can write something that does justice to the unique and wonderful person you are and the passion that you have to offer medicine, I guarantee you at least one place/person is going to see that, and they’re going to believe in you.
However, ultimately, you do need to bring it back and tie this into why you want to pursue medicine, what you see in medicine, and what you will contribute to the medical field.
9. Address any major deficits in your application and describe how you grew from that experience
Your personal statement is also a place to touch on any major deficits in your application, and the word ‘major’ is important there. That ‘C’ in organic chemistry probably isn’t a major deficit and not something you want to remind your readers of unnecessarily, but if there is a major deficient in your application affecting grades, test scores, or other experiences that is reasonably going to be very apparent to your readers anyway, the personal statement can be an excellent opportunity to address this head on and set the tone for your how readers will recall this portion of your application. This is one of the mechanisms by which if you do have a major deficit in your application, hope is certainly not lost! Incorporating this sort of explanation into your personal statement requires a lot of care and consideration with respect to your framing, and if you have one, you should particularly seek out a trusted faculty mentor in medicine with an M.D. who can give you some feedback/advice on your frame. You must strike a delicate balance here whereby you explain to your readers any extenuating circumstances or reasons that affected your decreased performance, without coming across as making excuses or complain-y. I believe that difficulty, failure, and hardship are also one of the most qualifying experiences that prepare you to be the one that 20 people will someday look to when a patient is crashing and everything is going wrong to be able to take control of the situation; if you’ve done some walking through hell yourself, even though I don’t wish it on you and I don’t mean to glorify experiences that shouldn’t be glorified, I do believe that this makes you more qualified to steer when stuff hits the fan. So it is also beneficial here to find some silver linings in your hardship - which there often are - and describe what you learned from this and how this actually reinforced your commitment to medicine, etc. This is potentially an opportunity to demonstrate that you are strong-willed and respond to hardships with determination. However I think this is context-dependent, as I also believe that there are horrible things that can happen to people that are so horrible that there simply is no good in them, and to dig for a ‘silver lining’ would be inappropriate and cause you undeserved suffering. You deserve space and respect particularly when it comes to these challenges and difficult experiences; you do not actually owe other people who don’t know you and don’t understand you an explanation of these things, and I want you to choose yourself and your own safety if you ever feel conflicted about how much you’re comfortable with describing or revisiting. I’ll close out this point by emphasizing that a trusted friend and mentor will probably be quite useful in developing this section of your personal statement, if applicable.
10. People you ask for feedback/edits should view this as a major undertaking
One of the biggest pitfalls I think people make with their personal statements is getting feedback from people that lack buy-in. It should not be taken lightly who you ask to edit your personal statement, and that person should see it as a significant commitment - you want to have quality edits, not a half-invested grammar check. It actually takes a ton of effort to give quality feedback. It’s relatively easy to edit something for grammar or syntax, or to make simple little suggestions. But you should be seeking editors who can really push and challenge your writing to bring it to the next level. These deeper edits involving the progression of your personal statement, the themes, the ideas, take significant time and energy from your editor. They need to be thinking deeply enough about what they’re reading, formulate what they feel like it’s missing or what could improve it, and articulate that to you. Be explicit from your editors up front that you’re asking for a significant commitment and you want thorough, critical feedback.
Beyond this, it is probably useful to have a few different people go through your personal statement. I actually disagree with the camp of people that say ‘Have as many people as you possibly can look it over and give you edits’ - nay I say, because you will find that everyone has an opinion, and 20 different people will pull your personal statement in 20 different directions, diluting out any resolute sense of direction or identity that was in it. Instead, I think you should pick the people you ask to edit your personal statement very carefully - pick people who first and foremost you think will actually give your personal statement the substantial time (at least several hours) and energy needed to formulate and communicate quality edits, then, try to pick people that know you and perhaps that will closely understand components of what you’re describing, who can help you more clearly articulate something they know you’re getting at but maybe aren’t saying in the most understandable way. Spend a lot of time with this one or two people going back and forth. I was very lucky to have my best friend whom I had grown up with and who is a skilled writer, give me several hours-long sessions of edits that involved deep discussion, back-and-forth dialogue, and debate. You need to decide which of their feedback you’re going to listen to and change your personal statement based on, and also which feedback you simply don’t agree with, and are willing to slightly alienate yourself from admissions committee members thinking similarly because you fundamentally disagree with their interpretation and you feel true to the point you’re trying to make, that other people WILL understand that. I would say it’s very important to be self-critical, and most of the time if you’re initially disagreeing with a piece of feedback or edit, you should be asking yourself if that’s just your ego and when you actually think about that edit more deeply it makes sense. So during this editing process, remain open-minded - be willing to restructure what you’re saying, include alternative experiences, or take a different tone - but also don’t change it so much that you feel like you’re losing the life blood of your personal statement and it’s no longer you.
Finally, toward the later part of your personal statement, I think it is good for you to have a trusted mentor or even a few - ideally physician/scientist faculty members who directly understand what medical school applications are like - look over your personal statement from the perspective of an admissions committee member. This can help you identify areas where your ideas just aren’t coming through clearly enough, or where admissions committee members are not taking away the ideas you think they are.
11. It’s never going to feel perfect - when you’re investing in lots of time on edits with minimal returns, it’s time to submit!
Ultimately, you may reach a ‘plateau’ point in your personal statement, where you can always keep re-reading it and finding little edits and changes to make, but really the return on that investment you’re getting is smaller and smaller. At this point, it’s time to give it that final, final, double/triple check read-through for spelling and grammar, and put it into AMCAS. Applying to medical school is a marathon and it literally takes an entire year. You have completed a substantial component of this, and you should feel proud of how far you’ve come - go celebrate!
I hope this post has been helpful, and if you ever find yourself feeling stuck or uncertain or wanting some further guidance, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Good luck!
